Chapter Text
Revali wakes with a sharp gasp for breath to fill lungs that have not tasted air in a century.
Funny. He’s fairly sure that’s not supposed to happen.
The world is dark for a few moments until his eyes begin to adjust to the dim lighting of dawn. The stone under his feathers is cold – when was the last time he felt cold?
Sitting up, his muscles creak achingly as he lifts a wing to press against his woozy head. Okay, he was on Medoh, her lights are blue – no sign of Malice. That’s a start. How did he-
He died. Right, Windblight. Then he was… he was trapped in Medoh’s walls, a restless spirit.
That's a lot to process. Something to unpack another time once his mind is a little less foggy.
Now however, he is breathing. He was alive. That shouldn’t be possible, and yet here he was.
Oh – Ganon. Link, he’d defeated Windblight and freed his spirit. Then, he and Medoh had set their weapons upon Ganon in the Castle, awaiting the moment the little Knight would strike.
Pushing himself slowly to unsteady feet, Revali stumbles to the edge of Medoh’s shoulder to glance out over the horizon as the sun rises. Hyrule Castle sits where it always has, finally clear of the Malice miasma that has shrouded its walls for a century.
“Well look at that, he finally did it,” he murmurs, immediate struck by how utterly ragged his voice sounds. A hundred years without a glass of water would do that, he supposes.
Coughing once to clear his dry throat he glances around, relieved when Medoh’s lights lead him to a dip in her stonework where clean rainwater has gathered. He nods a polite thanks as he heads straight to it and scoops as much water into his cupped wingtips as possible to pour into his beak.
As soon as the cool water hits his throat, he starts to feel less like a corpse and more like a living, breathing Rito again. It’s only after drinking his fill that he even thinks to look at his reflection in the water.
Green eyes, dark feathers, fledgling marks still on his cheeks. He hasn’t aged a day. There’s no blood crusted in his feathers, no broken bones or burnt skin. Reaching out to touch the Rito in the water is almost instinctive, yet all it does it ripple the surface of the puddle.
It’s been so long he’d almost forgotten what he looked like.
It’s Medoh’s silent nudge that forces him to look away, like a warm wing in the back of his mind redirecting his attention to Rito Village below. It looks the same way it did a hundred years back, and yet at the same time, so different. Like a familiar world reflected in a mirror, perfectly ordinary yet confusingly backwards.
“I…yes, that is the reasonable next step, isn’t it? To return…home.” Admittedly he doesn’t really register the words even as he’s speaking them. Speaking still feels a little clunky, he supposes it has been a while since he last used his voicebox.
It’s hardly home anymore, not really.
A hundred years.
No one he knew back then would still be alive, not even the fledglings. It must be their…grand children? Grandchildren’s children? What an unsettling thought.
The Elder, his countrymen, the warriors he’d grown up training alongside, the fledglings he’d watched learn to fly, the young women who would fill the village with song every evening, the shop owners, the innkeeper. Everyone he knew. Everyone he had ever known.
Medoh must sense his hesitation because he feels her nudge once more with a little more purpose. He knows she’s right, he cannot stay up here forever. She’s never had patience for cowardice – it’s one of the reasons the two of them bonded well, because neither did he.
Stretching out his wings and giving them a flex to ensure they still worked, Revali perches on the edge of the Divine Beast for a moment more, taking a deep breath before he dives. Drifting down towards Rito Village in a graceful spiral.
--
Talons tap against wood as Revali lands on a landing platform. Admittedly perhaps he should have a plan going into this. What was he supposed to do, merely waltz into the hut of whoever the village Elder was these days and announce that he was the great Champion Revali who died a hundred years prior – now somehow alive and unscathed?
They’d think he was insane, surely.
Two young fledglings run past giggling, one white, one yellow, they hardly notice his presence as they hop by playing their little game. As if he’s still a ghost.
Absentmindedly he follows them up the winding staircase, eyes drifting into open huts where unfamiliar Rito families still sleep, nestled into their hammocks in the cool morning air. The fledglings giggle and whisper as one of them runs, wielding a curved stick like an imaginary bow, and the other chases with her wings outstretched like a monster. Their excited chirps and laughter are innocent enough to warm his heart at first.
Then he begins to listen to the whispers of the game they’re playing.
“You can’t defeat me, evil beast! For I am the great Champion Revali, master of the winds, and I shall save Rito Village from the Calamity!”
“Fool, you are no match for me! I am the dark Lord Ganon – take THIS!”
“Nooo you’re too powerful!”
“Take THIS and THIS!”
“Noooooo!” The white fledgling giggles, dropping his stick as he dramatically falls to the ground to feign death, letting his tongue lop from the side of his beak goofily. “I’m DEAD you killed me! I wasn’t strong enough! Now everyone will DIE!”
The yellow fledgling starts giggling wildly, pressing her wings to her knees as she doubles over. “Okay okay, now be Link and kill me!”
“Okay!!” The white fledgling laughs, scrambling back to his feet and wielding his stick instead like a sword, puffing out his chest. “RAAAH, I’m the great knight Link and I am here to destroy you!”
Revali only realises he’s stopped moving when the two kids continue their chasing out of hearing range and he’s left staring emptily at the spot they’d previously occupied. Something in his chest feels…tight.
Is this…how he was remembered?
He supposes it’s not….entirely inaccurate. He did die – didn’t he? In the moment it really mattered. He failed his fight, failed to save Medoh, and in death doomed them to fail the fight against Calamity Ganon and to lose the war.
“You okay there?” An unfamiliar, gruff voice takes him off guard, snapping him out of a stupor. Revali turns sharply to look at the tall Rito man looking down at him. A warrior, by the looks of his armour, with white feathers covering his body. “You’ve been just standing here staring into space for a good few minutes now.”
Revali’s beak opens and snaps shut again quickly. He must look a little wide eyed and ruffled because the man holds up his wings as if he’s trying to calm a spooked horse. “I’m….fine,” he blurts out after a moment, narrowing his eyes sharply at the man as his hazy brain takes a few seconds to grasp for words. “I’m fine.”
“Havn’t seen you around here before, what brought you to Rito Village?” The Rito asks casually, resting a wing on his hip. It’s only as Revali is scanning over the man before him that it strikes him that the bow on the older Rito’s back is….his. Certainly older, it’s colour has faded a little over the years, but it’s his Great Falcon Bow – it even has his blue wind marker still tied to it’s top limb.
He’s so shocked that he doesn’t respond to the question and the white Rito raises a confused brow at him after a few seconds. “…Okay... well. If you need a place to stay, you should visit the Swallows Roost, they’ve usually got plenty of beds available.”
“Where did you get that?” Revali blurts out, immediately cursing himself for the bluntness of it. His wingtips itch to grab for it. It feels so wrong to see it on the back of another warrior – his precious bow. “…Your bow, I mean. Where did you….get it?”
The Rito seems to light up slightly, chest puffing just slightly as he gestures to the bow over his shoulder with his thumb feather. “This is actually the bow that belonged to the Rito Champion of old, the great Master Revali, before he was killed in the Calamity a hundred years ago. It has been passed down through generations of the greatest warriors the village has to offer, and I am its current wielder.”
He sounds so smug that Revali feels his brow furrow in distinct irritation. Clearly the fool isn’t going to part with his precious weapon easily. “This…great Master Revali. Pray tell, what happened to his home and belongings – other than his bow, of course?” It seems so…odd to refer to himself by a third party, “What happened after he… died?”
The man seems to look slightly bemused by the question, scratching at his neck feathers as he raises a brow. “You writing a history book or something?” he asks with a light chuckle, “’fraid after a hundred years all we really have left is his bow and his diary. It’s said he used to live by the flight range just north of here, but the hut there is just used as a storage shed and shelter from the snow while the fledglings train these days. We have plenty of stories about him, however, if you're interested?”
Ah. Well, he supposes it was a long shot to hope that perhaps his spare weapons and armour might still be around. Where will he live now? It strikes him quite suddenly that accompanying waking with no weapon, he also doesn’t exactly have rupees on him to afford a bed at an inn.
The mention of his diary makes his feathers raise awkwardly. Of course of all the things to survive the Calamity, his private diary would somehow make the cut and be found. How mortifying.
“As for what happened after he died – have you been living under a rock, kid?” The man chuckles, “The Calamity war? Hyrule being torn apart by hoards of monsters for a hundred years? The falling of the Champions was kind of the end of the last era of Hyrule, at least until now. We actually just had this kid, Link, come through here a few days ago, he was going to take on the Dark Beast Ganon – and by the look of the castle this morning, seems like maybe he’s succeeded.”
There’s that tight feeling in his chest again. Like an icy fist closing in around his heart.
His death caused a hundred year war. His failure caused a hundred years of suffering. He fell to Windblight because he wasn’t strong enough, and doomed everyone as a result. How pathetic, to be the warrior that failed. The warrior that didn’t just fail, but failed so tremendously that the world ended because of it.
Oh – shame. That’s what that feeling is. Deep, gut-wrenching shame. It’s nauseating.
“I’m happy to tell you more but…do you want to come upstairs and have a glass of water and some bread or something? I think my wife just baked a fresh loaf.” The Rito is looking down at him in concern. Oh, right, he hasn’t spoken in a while, has he? He should say something, surely, but his beak suddenly feels as stiff as rusted metal. “You look like you’re going to puke. Rough flight here? Maybe you should sit down for a minute...”
He hasn’t eaten in a hundred years and the promise of food awakens his stomach and makes it rumble as if on cue, yet the very idea of eating right now makes Revali viscerally wince in distaste. “I don’t…”
“Relax. The name’s Teba,” the man offers calmly, gesturing at the two fledglings still chasing one another up and down the stairway, “that’s my boy Tulin, and his friend Kotts. What’s your name?”
The ex-Champion of the Rito. The failure Champion that died and caused the Rito to suffer.
The pathetic, weak fool that was so confident he could take on Ganon alone, and then fell at the very first hurdle. Who was blasted from the sky by Windblight and killed and doomed everyone to a century of torment until they could be saved by the very knight he spent his days mocking.
The Rito who has no family, no friends, no-one left alive who knows him. Who has no home, no possessions, no role in the Village he once called home and was woven into like thread in a tapestry.
An odd panic rushes through his chest and the words rush out of Revali’s beak before he can stop them. “Nobody. I’m nobody.”
Nobody. Nothing.
Better a nobody than a failure.
“What do you-“ the white Rito begins to ask, his brows furrowed in obvious confusion as he steps forwards only to watch Revali stumble backwards a step in turn.
“I need to go,” Revali cuts him off sharply, feeling his breath catch in his throat as he propels himself over the railings of the staircase and stretches out his wings to glide, not daring to look back even as the man calls after him in confusion.
--
Medoh doesn’t call Revali a coward when he returns to her walls, curling in on himself in a cold corner like a fledgling hiding under its mothers wing. She doesn’t need to.
He feels the shame so deeply already that it aches.